Wizard of Ads Partners are not like your typical ad agency. To begin, we abandon the traditional ad agency model – the one that encourages the agency to sell the most marketing products possible to the client. Traditional ad agencies only make more money if the client buys more marketing products and services.

With the Wizard of Ads Partner model, the agency only makes more money if the client makes more money. Simple. Our benefit to the client is not in how many hours we spend working on your project, but in how well the project delivers results. Simple. So you never have to wonder if we’re recommending a particular marketing program because it’ll actually work, or because it’s a way to keep the agency busy that month. We’re not paid to be busy. We’re paid to grow your company. Simple. [more]

This topic came up in a conversation with Steve Rae, one of my partners, over dinner. It is very common for businesses to give their advertising people the following mission. You may even have done so yourself. I’ll include 3 different categories to illustrate the point.

How often do you see (or hear) a business spending so much of their advertising space giving directions, hours of operation, phone numbers, or any other methods of connecting the dots between the consumer and the business’s front door? This mistake made over and over again. The answer is simple, and it’s based on the point of view of the person making it.

Roy H. Williams built an empire by spreading his wisdom in little bite-sized pieces over many, many years. His Monday Morning Memo has been required-reading for small and medium sized owner operated businesses for two decades.

The best examples of this, right now anyway, are personal injury attorneys. Their ads are amazingly consistent from one to another. They have headlines like, "Have you been injured?" followed by their phone number or website. And in most cases, this is the entirety of their message. Qualifying someone as a potential customer is more important to this lawyer than building his brand. What would advertising be like if everyone used this model to build their message.

The Unfair Marketing Roadshow blew the walls out in Collingwood... Literally! Our friends and presenting sponsor @bayshorebroadcasting brought so many people we had to open the dividing wall at the @georgianbayhotel . Thank you!

The great Peter Nevland closes out the first stop of The Unfair Marketing Roadshow with his talk on creating characters kids will love and parents will pay for.

The Unfair Marketing Roadshow audience audience are on their feet for digital marketing expert Stephen Semple...but he may have asked them to do so :)